The White House is bad at technology. The President has a Twitter problem, he faces a suit over blocking users on the service and he doesn't seem to mind talking "Cyber Security" with Putin, who runs the country that allegedly hacked our (and other) elections. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity continues to seek the personal, identifying information of everyone who voted in the last election, something it is also being sued for. The commission also asked citizens to write in with feedback. As noted by former Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu on Twitter, however, the commission published 112 pages of public comment "without redacting email addresses, home addresses & phone numbers."

While it may seem like a good thing that the commission has solicited and shared public comment on its request for voter info, publishing the list of emails it has since received — without any redaction — seems like a pretty tone-deaf thing to do. Either they didn't check for personal information, or they didn't care. The ridiculous thing is that either is possible. Lu said in a message to Engadget, "Whether or not it's legal to disclose this personal information, it's clearly improper, and no responsible White House would do this."

The 112-page document contains phone numbers, email and even real world addresses in several of the signatures. This information can be used to identify and harass people with ease. It's possible the committee is required by law to release such public commentary, but they really should have redacted full names, email and home addresses. It's bad enough that the commission wants to spend the time and money to prove rampant voter fraud (that doesn't actually seem to have happened), but to gather and expose those who respond is sincerely irresponsible. How can any state trust the White House with its voter records if the executive committee in charge of the process can't even black out a few email addresses? We've reached out to the White House for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Update: The White House returned our request with the following email (redacted for privacy).